


up all night (to get lucky)

by dragonsinparis



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 18:14:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6968503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonsinparis/pseuds/dragonsinparis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marinette never made up with Adrien after that whole gum-on-the-seat incident - he never got a chance to explain - so it isn’t like she knows him well, but she’s still pretty sure he’s the last person she expected to see in the ER at two in the morning.</p><p>She can’t worry about it, though. She needs to come up with a plausible excuse to give to the doctors for the injuries she sustained from a fire while saving civilians, but she can’t concentrate past her fear for Chat Noir...who she knows is out there somewhere and hurt even worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	up all night (to get lucky)

The hospital is an alien world at two in the morning. 

Marinette has never found hospitals homey, exactly, but it’s not like they really bothered her all that much. They were places people came to get well and go home, so they didn’t have to  _ be _ home, they just had to be functional, and clean, and as orderly as feasibly possible.

And maybe, off in the wing of the hospital where the longer-term patients stayed, it’s still all of those things. But the ER is a mess, through no fault of the hard-working staff. There are people everywhere, miserable and sick and hurt and panicking, and even though she isn’t physically close to anyone, the whole place feels claustrophobia-inducing and smells like sterilized vomit.

She’s so exhausted. The burn across her shoulders and back is painful enough to keep her awake, even when she’s not trying to lie down on it. She had told herself she needed to deal with it alone, suck it up, but her pajama t-shirt had stuck to her back and when she’d tried to take it off she’d almost pulled off skin too; the fabric had come away sticky and red-yellow. Tikki, usually so keen to keep her secret, had begged Marinette to risk it and seek help.

Wandering the streets of Paris alone at night is practically her hobby at this point, so it was a lot less intimidating than trying to think up a lie to tell her parents so that they’d drive her and not totally freak out. She is both starving and nauseous. She can’t lie down. So she is just kind of swaying, trying her best not to cry and not to let her brain zone out so far that she falls asleep sitting up and winds up collapsing onto the floor.  

_ I can do this. I’m a hero of Paris. It’s a burn. And it’s awful but it’s not life-threatening and I can do this and Chat got the worst of it. Don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself, Marinette, it isn’t fair to him. _

Somehow akuma, despite all their rage and power, are far less terrifying than running into a burning building.  

She had still been able to use Lucky Charm, of course, but there were drawbacks: it couldn’t fix everything afterward - the Miraculous Ladybug swarm only came after an akuma - and it never made her a tool she couldn’t carry, or which relied on an outside element. She’d kind of hoped for a magical fire hose, but what she’d gotten was a mask that would filter out the smoke so she could breathe.

The mask had saved her life. It had saved Chat’s life, too; she’d had to go back in after him. They’d cleared the building of every resident but she still found herself running back in after he’d gone back for some crying child’s puppy and had taken longer than she could bear to wait. Her instincts hadn’t been wrong; she’d found him choking on smoke in a back hallway that was already half fire, clutching the small animal to his chest. She’d half-carried him out. Their suits had helped, but the vinyl - or whatever it was - had bubbled and peeled, and they both had skin that was raw and ruined underneath.

Their Miraculous stones had been running low already. They’d stumbled in separate directions out of pure habit, and it wasn’t until she had managed to limp two blocks away that her brain had rebooted and she’d realized just how badly he must have been hurt, simply based on what she’d been able to see and how long he’d been in the building.

She’d done what she’d always been afraid to do: she’d gone back looking for him, without her transformation. She hadn’t lasted long, though. She could barely walk. She could barely  _ see. _ She was lucky to have made it home, and lucky that home had offered her enough of a respite that she could make it to the nearest hospital.

Necker Hospital, on the Rue de  Sèvres, had been closest. Marinette was fairly certain that if called upon to find it again in the future from memory she wouldn’t be able to; she had simply typed ‘hospital’ into her phone’s map and followed its auditory directions, summoning up a new surge of willpower necessary for every step, waiting for it to tell her to turn right or left. Tikki had done her best to cheerlead, and to make sure that Marinette didn’t get hit by a car.

She’d been lucky. She’d gotten here safely, somehow. She isn’t sure how long the journey had taken, or how long she’s been in the waiting room: the ER is where her luck has run low. They are still dealing with stragglers from the fire, and there had been some kind of major car accident nearby earlier in the evening. Whatever she’d written on the form when she arrived - probably no more than ‘burn’ - isn’t enough to get her bumped up the line.

But the crowd has thinned now. The waiting room is almost empty, except for the persistent cougher huddled in the corner. She’s been so focused on holding herself together that even though she’s been in this room with them for at least an hour and a half, it’s only now that she realizes she  _ knows _ him. She goes to school with him. She sits right behind him in class.

Adrien Agreste.

What a disappointment he’d been.

It’s not that she hates him, really, any more than she hates Sabrina - probably less, because he never laughs at the catty things Chloe says the way Sabrina religiously does. Marinette knows that any real hostility comes from Chloe; she’s never seen him participate in it, beyond the gum on her chair the first day. Nino likes him a lot, but Nino likes everyone. Nino wouldn’t know a grudge if it broke a vintage record over his head and strangled him with his own headphones.

For her part, though, Marinette has too much history with Chloe’s bullying to trust or particularly like anyone willing to overlook her behavior. But sometimes she fantasizes about how perfect it would have been if the son of her absolute favorite designer was worth being friends with. She’d’ve probably gotten to go over to his house sometimes. She might even have been able to  _ meet Gabriel Agreste. _ He might even have  _ looked at her designs! _

People are people, though. Even Ladybug’s trademark good luck can’t change that.

But no matter how she feels about Adrien, it’s weird that he’s here, and it’s especially weird that he’s here alone. As far as she can tell, Adrien is virtually never alone; the second he steps out of the school his chauffeur (he has a  _ chauffeur _ ) and some dark-haired frown-faced lady - babysitter? Personal assistant? Bowling coach? Who knows. And who cares? - are already waiting to sweep him away.  

She’s kind of surprised that the Agreste mansion doesn’t have an on-call physician.

She’s also kind of surprised that his chauffeur or his frown-lady aren’t with him. The part of her that’s observant even when she wishes it wouldn’t be (she does not want to feel sorry for  _ Adrien Agreste, _ and she  _ definitely _ doesn’t want to do it at the expense of one of her idols) notes that she isn’t surprised Gabriel isn’t here; he’s pointedly absent from virtually every school function and event. And Nino, golden-hearted Nino, once referred to Gabriel Agreste as ‘a dick.’ Marinette is pretty sure that whatever that altercation involved is actually no small part of why Nino got akumatized.

It sucks to be alone in the ER when you’re fifteen years old. She happens to be enduring it right now, so she’s in a position to know. But she, at least, knows that she had to sneak out of the house because her parents love her dearly and would be deeply horrified that she put herself in danger.

She has a sinking, frustrating suspicion that Adrien is here alone because nobody noticed.

Her brain isn’t ready to go to  _ abuse, _ (and she isn’t sure there’s a way to abuse someone into a coughing fit) but he’s clearly in pain beyond that.

He’s clearly in enough of it that he hasn’t noticed anything around him, including her.

She’d like to be able to say later that she doesn’t hesitate: that she sees someone in pain and reaches out immediately. But she’s wary of her own limited ability to help this boy she barely knows, and her hesitance is exacerbated by her awareness that a few careless words from him once he knows she’s here too could get her in mountains of trouble. It might even put her secret in jeopardy.

But her brain does that thing that it secretly does way more often than she’d like to admit, and asks: what would  _ Chat Noir _ do?

She knows it’s her powers that publicly label her the leader of the duo, the hero of Paris. And she would never, ever want to trade her power for his - she loves to create, with or without powers, and she’d never stop second-guessing if she had to be the destroyer. But she wishes she could trade her heart for his, sometimes. She thinks so often of that first day they met, tumbling out of the sky together; she thinks of their first battle, where her faith was in crisis but his never wavered.

His faith wouldn’t waver here, either. Chat would reach out, no matter what his relationship was with the person in question.

She can’t help Chat right now, of course. She has no idea where he is. She’s wrapped up in dread for him, which she knows will get far worse when she can think properly past the haze of pain. She tends to spiral, and this is prime spiral material, and it isn’t like she can vent to Alya on this particular subject.

But she can offer some kindness to Adrien Agreste, when they’re both alone and miserable.

It’s what Ladybug would do. She spends so much time feeling as if she doesn’t live up to her own superhero persona: this is a way to shave just a bit of that feeling off. She doesn’t have to like him, and it isn’t as if there’s much she can do for him, but.

She can help him feel less alone. Who knows - maybe it will even make  _ her _ feel less alone.

She struggles to her feet, slowly and carefully. Her back screams at her, but it wasn’t exactly quiet before and once she’s started she’s pretty sure sitting back down won’t make it any better. She shuffles across the room - which somehow feels further than every inch she traveled to get to the ER in the first place - and lowers herself into the chair two away from his. She doesn’t know how he’s gonna react. Maybe he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s here, either, and she wants them to be able to ignore each other, just in case.

“Hey,” she says quietly. She has no idea where to go from there. He doesn’t seem to hear her, so she tries again, a bit louder.

His head rocks a bit and then rises, confused for a moment. She’s not in his direct line of sight, and he’s a little thrown. But then he turns his head enough to see her and after a second of incomprehension, there is such  _ relief _ in his face - a pure golden glow that radiates so clearly from not being alone - that for an instant her chest hurts more than her back. She forgets that he’s friends with Chloe, she forgets that she doesn’t even like him that much and that he put gum on her chair; all she can think about is the fact that his eyes are so green they almost look like Chat’s.  

“Hey,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> I mostly just played with this when I didn't have the brain capacity/angst tolerance to deal with my other Miraculous fic, so we'll see how far I get. I can only assume that sooner or later, there will be magical shenanigans and identity reveals. 
> 
> I'm sorry about the title. I'm garbage. This isn't news. In my defense, if there's a fandom that will pun at any given opportunity, it's this one.
> 
> come hang out with me on tumblr: http://dragonsinparis.tumblr.com/


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